From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes"
Subject: (urth) Summa contra Marcus
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 12:06:53 -0800
A summary of objections to the theory that Blue = Urth.
Others may wish to add any that I've missed.
I. The cosmographical objection.
The WHORL, a slower-than-light ship, set out _from_ the
Urth system. Barring evidence to the contrary (which has
not, to the best of my knowledge, been presented), it begins
in a reference frame more-or-less stationary relative to
the Solar system, accelerates away from the Solar system,
and eventually brakes to come to relative rest at another
system. In order for the "other system" to be the Solar
system, then, some mechanism must be provided for the motion
away from the Solar system to somehow bring the WHORL back
to the Solar system. Several such mechanisms are certainly
possible, as: the WHORL hit some kind of "space warp"
(which is, I believe, your proposal); the Solar system
hit ditto; the WHORL was gone so long that it wandered
around the edge of curved spacetime.
However, and this is the key here, it is not sufficient
for such a mechanism to be offered, or even for it to
be "plausible." Some _textual_ evidence (direct or
indirect) for the mechanism must also be adduced. To
say (as you have in effect done) that the space(-time)
warp must be present because it fits your theory, is
_not_ textual evidence; it is circular logic, using
the "Urth=Blue" theory as support for the "space warp"
theory which was, in turn, created to support the
"Urth=Blue" theory. If reasonably unambiguous textual
evidence could be adduced for the "space warp" theory,
then it would indeed support the "Urth=Blue" theory.
Likewise, if the "Urth=Blue" theory were supported by
evidence so strong that it could stand on its own, then
finding evidence for a mechanism might be problematized.
But as things stand ... no.
II. The genetic objection.
The life forms of Blue/Green are sufficiently different
from those of Urth that some mechanism must be proposed,
and evidence given, for the production of one from the
other. You have proposed _part_ of a mechanism (polyploidy),
a mechanism which may, in some cases, produce effects
similar to those seen in the life forms of Blue (but which
produces nothing vaguely similar to the inhumi). However,
no mechanism whatsoever has been offered for _why_ Urthian
animal forms might have become uniformly polyploid, and
with such uniform phenotypic effects evidencing in a
variety of species.
III. The chronological objection.
Related to the above. Assuming that the mechanism for
Urth's animalia becoming uniformly polyploid is discovered
and evidence given for it, you find yourself in a bit of
a sticky wicket. Either Blue is in Urth's distant past, or
it is in Ushas's distant future.
Now, if it is in Urth's past, the genetic objection becomes
redoubled -- a second mechanism must be provided for the
return of Urthian life to diploid normality by the era of
Severian. But other chronological objections (beginning,
but not limited to, the difficulty of placing an era
resembling the Blue of SHORT SUN anywhere in Severian's
apparent past) make this whole idea so unlikely that,
frankly, I dismiss it out of hand.
So suppose Blue to be the distant future of Ushas. Now, we
can begin by wondering: why the did Green Man not show the
"polyploid" characteristics of Bluvian life? Nor, indeed,
did he resemble the Neighbors, or Bluvian life forms in
general, in any interesting way. And, supposing you do
successfully overcome this objection -- for example, proposing
that the Green Man is from even farther in the future, a time
when the Colonists and the Inhumi have somehow merged into a
single species (mechanism required, etc.) -- then we would
need to have some plausible sequence of events leading from
Severian's time, to the Neighbors, to the colonists', to the
Green Man's.
IV. The objection from gravitation
This has been discussed to death ... but ... it's very hard
to produce a plausible argument for Green as a satellite of
Blue (even an escaped satellite) without producing tidal
effects of a scale that dwarf those described by Horn.
Similarly, the failure of Horn to describe any real
difference in weight, trajectory of thrown objects, walking
gait, etc., between the surfaces of Blue, Green, and the
Red Sun Whorl, and the "surface" of the WHORL (other than
the interesting discussion of floater mechanics in LONG SUN),
stands as strong evidence that the surface gravities of
Blue and Green are very similar, and very similar to that of
Urth, i.e., one G. Nor does the "climbing the tower one-handed"
business really help; we know that the Narrator is not subject
to the ordinary laws of physics when astrally travelling
(e.g., is, he is capable of creating weapons out of thin air);
further, that is, as noted in an earlier post, a classic
adventure fiction trope.
Summary of the summary: I admit that you have "dealt with"
each of these objections at some level in the past. The problem
is that in each case, your method of dealing with the objection
is to pile another hypothetical on top of the hypothesis already
in place (i.e., "Blue = Urth"). This might be satisfactory for a
theory with a really solid textual basis, but for a theory that
begins fairly shaky, such additional hypotheses are completely
unacceptable, because your explanations for the objections must,
of themselves, be solid enough to _support_ the overall theory.
--Blattid
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